Escape From Davao (6 page)

Yet no stars gleamed as bright as those pinned to the col ar of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. His élan, his corncob pipe, and his careful y cultivated intrepid persona seemed heaven-sent to a nation praying for a martial messiah. Figuratively welcomed back from his self-imposed Philippine exile, he was feted and honored in absentia across the country. Streets in large cities and small towns bore his name, as did infants. A cottage industry of MacArthur buttons, songs, and books capitalized on the general’s burgeoning celebrity. But defeating the Japanese in the Philippines would prove to be an impossible chal enge.

MacArthur’s troops wondered where the convoys they had been promised were. Buoyed by messages from Washington that suggested aid was forthcoming, MacArthur had reassured them that they had not been forgotten: “Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched,” read a grandiloquent January communiqué. “It is imperative that our troops hold until these reinforcements arrive…. It is a question now of courage and of determination…. If we fight, we wil win; if we retreat, we wil be destroyed.” And so the defenders dutiful y scanned the horizon for the ships. FDR had cabled President Quezon in December and assured him “that every vessel available is bearing … the strength that wil eventual y crush the enemy and liberate your native land.” But in the wake of the Japanese attack on the Philippines, Washington concluded that it could not reinforce the

islands.

With the German and Italian declarations of war, the United States had found itself at war with three nations, yet having been attacked by and engaged in hostilities with only one of the bel igerents. America’s ill-prepared military—budget cuts and isolationist sentiments during the Depression had decimated the armed forces—precluded simultaneous offensive action against al three enemies. (As of November 1, 1938, only ten months before Germany’s invasion of Poland, the United States ranked nineteenth global y in the size of its total air and land forces, just behind Portugal and slightly ahead of neutral Switzerland.) According to Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Britain’s senior military liaison in Washington, the United States was “more unready for war than it is possible to imagine … the whole military organization belongs to the days of George Washington.”

At the end of the three-week Arcadia Conference in Washington in mid-January, the United States and Britain concluded that Nazi Germany posed the greater threat to the Al ies. Anglo-American strategists believed that should Soviet Russia be knocked out of the war, Germany would then have inexhaustible resources with which to invade the British Isles and perhaps even march on Central Asia to link up with Japanese forces. A strategic defense would therefore be maintained in the Pacific until Germany was defeated.

In his fireside chat with Americans on the night of February 23, Roosevelt intimated that the Philippines campaign would be abandoned: “We knew that to obtain our objective, many varieties of operations would be necessary in areas other than the Philippines.” But word never reached the men fighting there.

The cables transmitted to the Philippines were purposely enigmatic. Early in the fighting, MacArthur received messages informing him that relief shipments were being dispatched. He was not told, however, that the convoys were not intended for the Philippines. The misleading statements, which compounded in the ensuing weeks, stemmed from strategic and political necessity. The messages were designed to keep the Fil-American forces fighting—fighting long enough to save Australia and to save face. In the Far East, where shame was a cultural bedrock, a pull-out from the Philippines would further damage the remnants of American prestige and the morale of the peoples of the Far East who looked to the United States as their liberator from the Japanese yoke. It would also damage the sagging spirits of the American people. The Philippines defenders had to be kept fighting at al costs. “There are times,” Henry Stimson would write in his diary, “when men have

to die.”

As mechanics on Bataan scrounged spare parts, five brand-new planes were earmarked for Cuba. Wounded men suffered in Malinta Tunnel while bureaucrats debated a requistion to send 500 railroad picks to Nigeria because of the African nation’s “strategic importance.” In March, exports to the Soviet Union more than doubled—aid to the communist nation would total $346 mil ion by May. Conversely, as the forces on Bataan were being starved into submission, not a single ship cleared for the Philippines, though FDR

insisted that the Navy was “following an intensive and well-planned campaign which wil result in positive assistance to the defense of the Philippine Islands.” There was no such campaign.

Perhaps the biggest blow delivered by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor was a psychological one. On Christmas Day 1941, the new commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Chester Nimitz, arrived on Oahu to find morale at “rock bottom” and members of his new staff taking sedatives. The shock of the December 7 attack had even turned some senior officers’ hair white. Despite the fact that its flotil a of aircraft carriers had escaped the attack unscathed and shore instal ations in Hawaii were relatively unharmed, a crisis of confidence had led the Pacific Fleet to assume a triangular defensive posture from the Aleutian Islands to Hawaii and down into the Panama Canal Zone.

Because of the decision to put Europe first, as “American war supplies were speeded” around the globe, revealed the
Chicago Tribune
in a 1944 exposé, the Philippines “virtual y became a forgotten theater of war.”

A vociferous campaign for a greater effort in the Pacific reached its apex between late January and April.

Segments of the press and members of Congress blasted both the Roosevelt administration and the War Department for the perceived inability to aid MacArthur. In January, Senator James E. Murray, a liberal Montana Democrat, was unhappy to learn that a convoy had recently landed in Northern Ireland, commenting that “it would seem to me that if the expedition had been sent across the Pacific, it would have been much better.” Ohio Republican senator Robert A. Taft concurred: “I am sincerely hopeful that someone is thinking of getting assistance to the forces fighting in the Far East.”

That someone was an obscure, chain-smoking Army brigadier general who months earlier had been misidentified in a newspaper caption as “Lt. Col. D. D. Ersenbeing.” Army Chief of Staff George C.

Marshal had summoned General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former MacArthur aide, to Washington for the purpose of resupplying the Philippines. The two men met on December 14, 1941, in the War Department offices at the old Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue. Eisenhower realized the hopeless situation, but argued that “we must do everything for [the Fil-American forces] that is humanly possible.”

“I agree with you,” replied Marshal . “Do your best to save them.”

Eisenhower’s first major assignment of the war was, in his own words, “a problem that defied solution.”

Submarines brought in some supplies, but trepid Navy brass thwarted plans to use aircraft carriers to ferry planes to Bataan. A blockade-running scheme was a dismal failure. Eisenhower grew discouraged, noting in January 1942, “I’ve been insisting that the Far East is critical—and no sideshows should be undertaken until air and ground there are in satisfactory state.” Instead, the Army was undertaking other strategic operations. Within a few weeks, Eisenhower would skyrocket through the Army command hierarchy and soon be immersed in these other plans.

Initial y, it seemed as though the Fil-American defenders needed little aid. One Japanese general described the retreat of USAFFE troops into Bataan as a “cat entering a sack,” but the events of January and February proved the defenders’ resolve. The Filipino troops who had fled the battlefields of Luzon in December had become, in one officer’s estimation, “battle-hardened, vicious, disease-ridden, jungle-fighting experts.” Pilots, bluejackets, clerks, and cooks were turned into infantry. The once maligned “dogfaces” of the 31st Infantry Regiment—American soldiers would not cal themselves “GIs” or be popularly referred to as such until later in the war—were proving themselves to be USAFFE’s backbone. So high was their morale that after learning that a Japanese submarine had shel ed a refinery near Santa Barbara, California, some considered sending a radiogram: “Hold out for thirty days and WE wil send you reinforcements.” They took immense pride in what Lt. Henry Lee cal ed “Our war—our own little rat trap, the hopeless defense of Bataan, a rear guard with no main body, but a thorn in the flesh of Japan.”

A thorn indeed. When General Homma attempted to land 2,500 troops on Bataan’s western coast in an effort to break the stalemate in late January—the crucial struggle known as the Battle of the Points—he was repulsed by Philippine Scouts and an improvised army of airmen, sailors, and engineers. An attempt to break through the II Corps sector in eastern Bataan resulted in another Japanese setback the Battle of Trail 2. And even when Homma’s troops managed to puncture USAFFE’s lines, they were quickly isolated and destroyed in the Battle of the Pockets. The defenders’ efforts would save Australia from invasion and perhaps Hawaii, but they would not be able to save themselves. Shameful y behind schedule, Homma would request reinforcements. As the Japanese prepared for a campaign-deciding offensive in April, an unnerving lul swept over the war-torn Philippines.

As MacArthur would later exclaim, “no troops have ever done so much with so little.” USAFFE’s food reserves, further drained by thousands of civilian refugees, vanished at an astounding rate. Unscrupulous quartermasters, rear echelon officers, and a battlefield black market—where cans of food and packs of cigarettes went for between $5 and $20 apiece—exacerbated the situation. As the daily ration dwindled to 1000 calories, less than one-third of the intake required by combat soldiers, men col apsed in chow lines.

In March, Wainwright, when informed that the horses of the 26th Cavalry were out of fodder, ordered them slaughtered to provide his men with meat. It was a sad reward for such loyal, heroic animals: in mid-January, the 26th Cavalry had made the last mounted charge in U.S. history. The ravenous troops not only picked the jungle clean of al edible vegetation, including bananas, breadfruit, papayas, mangoes, and wild Philippine sweet potatoes cal ed camotes, but also resorted to previously spurned species to supplement their rations of canned salmon and worm-ridden rice. They ate dogs, cats, grasshoppers, monkeys, iguanas, python eggs, and carabao, the ubiquitous Philippine water buffalo. Anything, it seemed, was fair game.

Doctors, nurses, and medics were doing their best to fight the tropical diseases endemic to the jungle, but the swarms of insects and parasites were as relentless as the Japanese. In mid-February, with most of the troops suffering from a miscel any of tropical maladies, the USAFFE surgeon general estimated the combat efficiency of the defenders of Bataan at a startling 55 percent. Most Filipino troops, fighting shoeless, were ravaged with hookworm. The hospital laterals in Corregidor’s Malinta Tunnel and the two field hospitals on Bataan, where thousands of patients lay in rows of cots and triple-stacked iron beds scattered among bamboo and palm groves, bulged to capacity, supplies of quinine, sulfa drugs, morphine, blood plasma, and anesthetic having long been exhausted. Between bombings—Japanese pilots often ignored the red crosses on the roofs of the field hospitals—surgeons worked in primitive operating shacks. Upon the gory piles of gangrenous limbs they tossed metal pieces of shrapnel extracted from soldiers’ bodies—the results of America’s prewar scrap metal sales to Japan.

Between artil ery barrages and bombing raids, the beleaguered troops wrote poems, diary entries, and letters. One note—an attempt at alleviating the gnawing fears of loved ones—written by Ed Dyess was one of the lucky ones to breach the Japanese blockade.

Bataan

Mar. 10, 1942

Dear Folks—

In just a few minutes this note is to be put in the hands of chance,

& I hope it gets home by the time I do (which might not be to long)
Everything is o.k. here & not as bad as it might be pictured. The food could be better as well
as living conditions, but nobody gives a damn because the moral is high.

As soon as we kick the nips off the island, we take a short trip to Tokyo for a little clean up
job, & board a boat for good Old U.S.A.,

& to you, mabe too many days will not have passed.

All my love,

Edwin

They also tuned in music from Manila, the “Voice of Freedom”—the USAFFE radio station originating from Malinta Tunnel—shortwave broadcasts from the States, and, in the absence of celebrity-fil ed USO

shows, performed their own skits and musicals. Chaplains offered field masses, and their sermons, as could be expected, preached the merits of hope, prayer, and patience. It was on Bataan that the famous battlefield declaration “there are no atheists in foxholes” was rumored to have been uttered by a Catholic priest, Father Wil iam T. Cummings. The rumor mil operated around the clock. The thunder bursts of sea storms were believed to be the guns of the approaching “Victory” convoy blasting its way through the blockade bringing planes and food.

The forces on Corregidor and Bataan believed implicitly that their moment of redemption was at hand, despite the best Japanese efforts to dissuade them. Enemy planes dropped menus from the Manila Hotel; sound trucks alternated blood-curdling shrieks with songs and stilted commentary. During the nightly show on Manila’s Japanese-control ed station KZRH, a seductive female voice purred propaganda. Few took the messages seriously, but it was nevertheless difficult to ignore the show’s haunting theme song: “I’m Waiting for Ships That Never Come In.” After reporting on the losing battle for several months, United Press International correspondent Frank Hewlett wrote the doggerel that would forever be linked with the Philippines campaign: